Grumbly Belly = Food Journaling

On Monday, Cait (formerly Blonde on a Budget – now CaitFlanders.com) did a blog post about mindful eating and her results from tracking what she ate that was perfectly timed for me. That morning I had been talking to my running buddy about my grumbly tummy after eating some ice cream the night before. And the week before I had actually started tracking some of my food because my tummy had been upset by something… but got sidetracked by the weekend and stopped…

Cait’s blog post was just the right inspiration to start again and really take a serious look at what I’m eating and what my body feels like based on what I’ve put in it. So starting on Monday, I have been doing some food journaling.

A few years back, after dealing with a grumbly belly, and all the other symptoms of an unhappy digestive system, I went to a naturopath to get some help. We did a few tests and eventually figured out that my body was intolerant or sensitive to a variety of things including gluten, wheat, almonds, whey (one of the proteins in milk) and eggs. The sensitivities were to varying degrees, so we worked out that I should eliminate the highest ones completely, and attempt to limit the others.

For the first few months I worked really hard at it. I struggled at first while I figured out how to change my routines with the new restrictions. I mean, what was a healthy snack now that I couldn’t have my almonds every day… And do you know how many snack foods have whey as an ingredient?!? But, the results were pretty great. The grumbling stopped and I definitely felt like I had more energy.

However, I have definitely gotten lazy and complacent about things lately… And I feel like some of my sensitivities have changed over the course of the last few years. This is totally possible because often sensitivities change based on your diet and tolerances can improve when the quantity of a food is limited.

I hope that by journaling all my food intake and how my belly is feeling I will be able to update my diet restrictions with my findings.

Because I need a target date for completing this journaling challenge (otherwise it will just be too daunting), I will plan to do a follow up blog post around July 12th. That will be about a month of journaling and hopefully I will have something to report…

And of course I want to keep track of this somewhere… so what better place than my bullet journal! Unfortunately, I already had my week laid out before I decided to start with this task, so I didn’t have space in my weekly layout for it…

So I did a temporary food journal page for this week… And will have to review my weekly layout before next week to see if I can squeeze this in somewhere…

Have you done any food journaling before? Has it helped you discover food that your body doesn’t like? Or maybe kept you accountable for another food related goal?

Post navigation

2 thoughts on “Grumbly Belly = Food Journaling”

I’ve never done a food journal per se, but I have done a cleanse that was supposed to have a “reintroduction” phase to it which was a helpful tool. I say supposed to have because I did the cleanse to kick start a new nutrition journey rather than to fix any physical discomfort. Hopefully you’ll be able to use this tool to identify some trends on what your body reacts to more – the usual suspects are any foods that cause inflammation (sugars, complex carbs, trans fats) but from the looks of your log you balance things off pretty well. Might be soy, I know a few people that have issues with proper digestion of soy that might be a culprit.

So far I’m leaning towards potatoes? I am not sure… But I think I may have to do some elimination to sort it out because I do eat so many different things and reactions can be so delayed when it comes to digestion…